21. Two Roads Neurodiverged in the Wood

He didn't take the path less traveled by, fight me.

In November 2023, I received confirmation of what I had long suspected¹ - I am neurodivergent. Learning about this diagnosis has been fascinating, validating, and frustrating. Fascinating that so many “quirks” in my personality align textbook-like with neurodiversity. Validating that I’m not too sensitive or dramatic. Frustrating because I’m relearning how to understand and communicate my needs.

My brain is never not on. In a lemons-into-lemonade twist, I inadvertently turned one of my greatest weaknesses - sensory overload - into one of my greatest strengths - sensory overload but in a fun way. (Still, don’t turn on overhead lights around me, and please for the love of god do not wear scented products around me.)

One of the most frustrating aspects of my sensory journey, specifically beer and specifically specifically tasting, has been my lack of confidence in my style discrimination skills. I’ve enviously watched people around me confidently blind taste samples and correctly identify the style. I’ve wondered how they do it. How can they be so sure of something that seems just out of my grasp? Even through studying for my final attempt at the Master Cicerone, I would narrow down my style choices to two options and almost always seemed to switch my answer to the incorrect option at the last minute.²

Want me to memorize dumb stats that I can look up in a second with the small computer I have on my person at all times? Sure, no problem. I have an excellent memory. I have the kind of memory that I can remember which book page the information I’m looking for is on. I’ve also learned that my neurodivergence plays a part in this - I often remember minute details of a person that can come across as creepy. I promise I’m not obsessed with you, I just remember that you told me once that you hate red onions and your cousin broke your finger during a game of tag.

So how does neurodivergence come into play? In the same way gender comes into play. You didn’t think I wasn’t going to bring sexism into this conversation, did you? C’mon, you know me better than that.

As I wrote in my Like Other Girls newsletter, girls are socialized to be “good girls.” We have to be agreeable, polite, and nice. This is known as “Good Girl Conditioning” and reinforces gender roles and stereotypes. We seek external validation and approval from others, especially men and people in positions of power. Included in the laundry list of good girl conditioning effects are people pleasing, perfectionism, feelings of self-doubt, and “imposter syndrome.”³

When we’re called “good” as children, it usually means we’re compliant, quiet, and meeting other people’s needs before our own, i.e. “listening to instructions” or “being a pleasure to have in class.” We’re taught not to listen to our intuition because doing so might mean that someone else will be upset that we’re not doing what they want. We’re taught to put aside our feelings and our gut instincts to make others feel comfortable. We train ourselves to undermine ourselves so we’re less threatening and more agreeable. 

We’re taught that validation is an external pursuit, not an internal pursuit. Men are taught to be confident and self-assured. Women are taught to be timid and humble. We’re taught to fall in line and get rewarded for it. We internalize good-girl laws such as not showing too much self-esteem and centering the needs and feelings of others at the expense of our comfort and safety. After a while, our brains learn that we are not to be trusted. Our decisions, thoughts, and needs are to be second-guessed, to be framed not as what’s best for us, what our intuition tells us, but rather what’s best for those around us.

The messaging is similar for neurodiversity. Maybe you’re not good at reading social cues. Maybe you act in a way that society deems improper. Maybe you’re pressured into enduring social niceties that feel like torture to you, such as eye contact and small talk. The list goes on. Eventually, you internalize that your instincts can’t be trusted, even if you’re not aware those are the lessons you’ve learned.

For me, developing my style discrimination skills brought all of this messaging to a head. The intersectionality of gender and disability was more of a collision between all the ways I had been taught that I shouldn’t trust my instincts. This is a relatively recent realization for me, and I don’t think I’ve fully grasped the extent to which I’ve limited myself in other areas of my life by ignoring my instincts and lived experiences.

Being able to name the problem is a powerful first step. Learning to recognize the ways that problem shows up in your life is a good next step. I know I’m not the only woman out there who struggles with tasting confidence, partly because I’ve had women say that they think their roadblock is not relying on their instincts.

The struggle can be in changing those internalized behaviors. I often remind people that developing sensory skills is not a linear process. Some days I’m the best taster in the world who can’t be beat! Some days I know nothing about beer and am just the worst taster in the world. Neither of these is true, of course, and they’re not true for anyone else in the world either.

What are some steps we can take to reprogram ourselves to trust our instincts when it comes to blind-tasting beer? First, reframe it. If you’ve managed to narrow down a blind sample to two or three potential styles, that’s pretty fucking awesome. Even if you don’t select the correct style, take a moment to celebrate that you got super close. 

Second, reflect on your progress. One thing I wish I had done from the start was keep track of my tasting notes in one central place, such as a spreadsheet. That way, I could look at what flavors I ascribed to beer styles and specific brands, how my descriptors changed over time, and identify key flavor components for me in specific brands. For example, if I perceive white pepper every time I blind taste Saison Dupont and Anjou pears every time I blind taste Westmalle Tripel, then that builds my confidence that when I blind taste a sample and perceive white pepper, the sample is more likely to be a Saison, specifically Saison Dupont.⁴

I highly encourage you to catalog your tasting notes somewhere, not only as a study aid but also as a way to document your progress. If anyone is into tedium and wants to catalog my years of blind-tasting notes, let me know.

Third, name it. Decide on what you think the style is and why. If you are tasting with someone else or a group (or even alone, for that matter), say it out loud. Declare it with confidence. The purpose of this is twofold. One, you get used to making declarative statements about your conclusions, so you learn that speaking up about your instincts is not as scary as it seems. Two, sometimes you will be wrong and you’ll not only learn what it feels like to be wrong out loud but you also learn that being incorrect is not the end of the world. Being wrong doesn’t erase all the work you’re putting in. It’s part of the process and it presents you with the opportunity to delineate between styles based on your perceptions.

Being good at things like style discrimination and blind tastings are not innate traits for anyone. No one is born with the perfect combination of genetics to make them a taster superior to other tasters by nature rather than nurture. I would argue that no one is born with the almost perfect combination of genetics to make them a superior taster.

Expertise is not perfection and is based on experience, not genetics. The more experience we have tasting beer, the better we are at learning to associate specific sets of features as synthetic objects. Connections between neurons change with experience so increased discrimination activity leads to long-lasting increases in subsequent discrimination activity.

Earthy? More Like Dearthy (get it)

From time to time, oft-used flavor descriptors will make me stop and think, “But what does that mean exactly? What are we trying to convey? What does it mean to me when I use it?” More recently, that descriptor has been “earthy.”

The thought popped up when I was recording a podcast episode with my cohost and owner of Pilot Brewing, Rachael Hudson.⁵ We were discussing hop growing regions and flavor descriptions of hops when I briefly derailed the conversation by asking Rachael what she thought “earthy” conveyed. Like me, she had a hard time breaking it down further. It’s not geosmin, exactly. It’s not necessarily mushroomy or moldy. Is it decay? I’m not sure.

Huzzah, it’s an opportunity to improve my flavor description skills! Kind of.

Before I dive into the research I did, I’d like to point out something that I think a lot of us get stuck on, including me. Aroma is adiaphorous - it is neither good nor bad. Its molecular structure is neither good nor bad. Aromas are - for the most part - neither beneficial nor detrimental. Some exceptions, like the smells of decaying animals (including humans) or ammonia, trigger our revulsion as an evolutionary protection against certain harm. But for the most part, aromas are like our pets - we ascribe personalities to them but at the end of the day, those are projections and not reality.

I’ve mentioned before how the concept of “clean” arose during the Black Plague and that different cultures ascribe “clean” to different aromas. In Eurocolonial cultures, it’s linen or lemons. In other cultures, it may be musk. Further, an often overlooked core value of Eurocolonial cultural hegemony is the “olfactory neutrality” of those in positions of power and the “odorous” nature of marginalized groups.

All to say that words have meaning, but aromas do not abide by them simply because we say lavender is relaxing, chamomile makes us sleepy, or skunks smell bad. Priming and the placebo effect have a lot to do with how we interact with aroma.

ANYWAY

The first place I usually go for projects like this is Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells by Harold McGee. It is a 600-page field guide, so it can be read like a regular book, but I’ve found it more digestible when I want to learn specific information, especially specific information about beer world aromas that aren’t the same descriptors and explanations regurgitated throughout beer literature.

I read through chapter 14, which is all about the aromas of soil, fungi, and stone. I encountered a lot of descriptors that go deeper than “earthy,” such as the aforementioned geosmin and mushroomy, as well as petrichor, potato, camphor, and leather.

The geosmin and mushroomy descriptors were what got me thinking about ascribing “good” and “bad” to flavor descriptors because I learned about both in the context of flaws in beer. When I say that I pick up geosmin in a beer, that usually indicates that the beer contains contaminated water. However, when I smell fresh beets, I don’t think there’s something wrong with the beets. They just smell like …beets.

The section on mushrooms was educational because it broke down the common aromas for mushrooms, breaking “mushroomy” into ammonia, acetaldehyde, almond, and geosmin. However, when I thought about describing a beer as having aromas of ammonia, acetaldehyde, almond, and geosmin, three of those four descriptors are typically associated with flaws and the other can be associated with age.

The conundrum is that there is a fine line between describing flavors in an evocative and specific way and breaking the aroma components down so much that they don’t convey the message I intend. Culturally, we do ascribe good and bad to descriptors like earthy (usually good, like English hops), geosmin (usually bad, like contaminated water), mushroomy (usually bad, like musty malt), and ammonia (duh).

In the case of a descriptor like earthy, is the sum greater than the parts? Perhaps, but I find that when we have a hard time describing what *exactly* we mean when we use a term there is usually an opportunity to be more specific.

On the other hand, intent versus impact is also a consideration. For example, if I enter a Strong Bitter into a competition, what is my reaction to receiving a scoresheet back that discusses the style-appropriate earthiness of the English hops I used? What if instead, the scoresheet discusses the (still technically correct) geosmin and mushroomy aromas from the English hops? Taking the hypothetical even further, what if the scoresheet is even more specific and discusses the geosmin, ammonia, acetaldehyde, and almond notes of the English hops?

With one scoresheet, I’m pleased that my selected hops had the intended impact. With the next scoresheet, I’m a little confused and think that maybe I overlooked an issue with my ingredients. With the last scoresheet, I’m wondering how I could have missed these obvious flaws.

I don’t have a pithy conclusion for how to handle this. I think it boils down to knowing your audience. If your audience is a brewer who has entered a beer in a competition, then maybe sticking to earthy is the way to go. If you are trying to drill down your understanding of what “earthy” entails to improve your descriptive skills, then I say drill away and get as specific as you can. Then, like me, decide for yourself whether the completely deconstructed descriptions are useful or not to share with others. There may be times when earthy is all you need and other times when you feel it’s necessary (or more fun) to dive deeper.

And finally

Before we leave each other, here are a few more things I am up to these days:

1. Preparing for my sensory presentation at Barrel & Flow in Pittsburgh in August. This will be not only my first time presenting at Barrel & Flow, but also my first time attending! I’ve been wanting to go to Barrel & Flow for a while and I’m excited to go back to Pittsburgh, which is a really cool city.

2. Reading Eyeliner: A Cultural History by Zahra Hankir. This book focuses on the role eyeliner has played through time and culture, from signaling religious devotion to Gen Z beauty influencers.

3. Listening to I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. We need more books about women over 40 enjoying themselves as grown-ass women. Enjoying themselves in ways that don’t still center on marriage and children. And being single and childless by choice and not in the tropey pursuit of “having it all.” Just …existing and doing things solely because they feel good.

1. Given my enthusiasm for parentheses, footnotes, em dashes, and the like, many of you may have also suspected this.

2. Stick with your first answer. There was only one time in my tasting exam experience that I scratched out my first (incorrect) answer and wrote down my second thought (correct) answer and then switched it back to the incorrect answer because I remembered that I should stick with my first answer. One time out of possibly hundreds. Don’t talk yourself out of your correct answers.

3. Please, please, please STOP SAYING IMPOSTER SYNDROME. The concept of imposter syndrome is victim blamey in that it puts the onus of feeling misplaced squarely on the shoulders of the person who feels like they don’t belong. You are not an imposter. You are trying to be successful in an environment that was not built with you in mind nor was it designed for you to succeed.

4. To be clear, if you are preparing for any level of BJCP or Cicerone, there is no level that requires you to correctly identify the BRAND of beer, just the style. I think it can be easy to get lost in the trees of trying to determine the exact brand rather than determining the forest of the style.

5. BTW, I co-host a podcast called False Bottomed Girls! If you didn’t know that, now you do, and I would love for you to listen to it. If you already listen to it, please take a minute or so to rate and review it. We appreciate it!